Agenda

Everyday cryptography - talking about crypto without complex maths

Good cryptography is hard, but learning the basic concepts don't have to
have to be. By focussing on the key concepts, rather than the exotic maths,
I hope we can initiate more people into understanding what good security
looks like without having to take a University course. For those who already
know their MACs from their IKEs, I hope this talk offers some useful ways
of communicating these concepts to colleagues, friends and family.

Fun with an Amazon Echo, Ruby and Recipes

Voice interfaces open up so many interesting possibilities and in this talk
I'll show you how to very quickly build and deploy a useful "skill" with
Ruby, and at the same time, make sure you hopefully don't burn the dinner.

How I met "Double Dutch" and he helped to remedy fear of injection.

The story about how ideas from other languages can help us write
simple, elegant Ruby code. In this presentation we will look at a Double Dispatch pattern,
Excel(spreadsheet) injection, how they go together and why fighting
(accidental) code complexity matters.

Afterwards

We aim to finish up the talks by 8pm and if you'd like to socialise with other
LRUG attendees afterwards you have two choices:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If you can't attend the talks we'd still be very happy to see you at this part
of the meeting. Do come along!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Agenda

OpenPolitics: making policy with open source ideas

The OpenPolitics project is a collaborative political policy-writing
platform. Started as an experiment in using open source principles
outside the world of tech, it’s grown into a tool (written in Ruby)
that allows anyone with a good idea to take a direct role in writing
policy. This talk will explain how the project started, how the system
evolved, and how it currently works atop git and GitHub to make open
source workflows democratic and accessible by non-developers.

5 ways to keep docs up to date

Project documentation often falls into a cycle of disrepair: it's
not read because it's not up to date, and not up to date because
nobody reads it. This is a talk about how we tried to break that
cycle for GOV.UK's internal developer documentation. I'll cover what
we tried, what works & what doesn't, and how to employ a punny chat
bot to help you.

Afterwards

The talks will take us to 8pm or thereabouts. The end of the talks doesn't
have to be the end of the evening though. We suggest you choose one of
the following venues if you want to keep chatting to your fellow LRUG
attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Agenda

Work Smart, Not Hard

Work Smart, Not Hard draws on Paula’s experience as an international
violinist and Makers Academy alumna to promote practices that lead to code
that’s well-designed, extensible, easy to debug, and enjoyable to write.

Splitting strings

Making a Ruby with Lisp Syntax

I'll be discussing compiler design and sharing my experiences of designing a
Lisp-like language which compiles to Ruby.

Afterwards

The talks will take us to 8pm or thereabouts. The end of the talks doesn't
have to be the end of the evening though. We suggest you choose one of
the following venues if you want to keep chatting to your fellow LRUG
attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Agenda

Let Humans Human and Computers Computer - A Tale of Building Effective Automations

Boring, repetitive tasks, are, if we like it or not, part of our daily
routine as developers. We can try to automate them away as much as
possible, but what exactly makes a good automation? By looking at a
number of common and not so common automations, we'll see how we can
make computers do what they do best and at the same time keep us humans
in control.

Hindsight: Creating the Perfect Project History

A demonstration of a new proof-of-concept ruby tool for automatically
creating a perfect project history using git, tests and coverage
tools. How would you have built your app if you knew from the start
everything you know now.

A Trip Back to Where I Grew Up

Andrew recently revisited a place he left long ago. He was happy to
find that things had changed for the better, and wants to share his
story.

Afterwards

The talks will take us to 8pm or thereabouts. The end of the talks doesn't
have to be the end of the evening though. We suggest you choose one of
the following venues if you want to keep chatting to your fellow LRUG
attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Agenda

Let the Cats out of the bag

A talk about cats, boxes and category theory. Do you lie awake at night
thinking about monads? Do you wonder why the identity of the exclusive
OR Monoid is false? No, of course not… because you're still not sure
what the hell they are! Allow me to explain with a beginner friendly
introduction to Category Theory - with cats! And may your dreams once
again be full of maths.

Empathetech

Lola Odelola has been looking at the role empathy
plays in technology and is going to tell us all about it.

Why Writing Software Is Nothing Like Building A House

A brief exploration of the problems intrinsic to software project
management, and a couple of suggestions for how we coders can help
our non-technical colleagues get round them.

Food and Drinks

The nice people at Nested have arranged to provide us with some food
and drinks. These will be available before the meeting in the Skills
Matter downstairs bar area.

Nested is one of the UK’s (and Europe's) fastest-growing prop tech
companies, and they're proud of their great working culture and the
learning & growth opportunities they offer. They’re hiring and keen to
speak with Ruby on Rails developers looking for their next challenge.

Afterwards

The talks will take us to 8pm or thereabouts. The end of the talks doesn't
have to be the end of the evening though. We suggest you choose one of
the following venues if you want to keep chatting to your fellow LRUG
attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Building a webserver in Elixir

To a Ruby developer Elixir can seam like one of an overwhelming selection of trendy new languages. Elixir's lightweight processes mark it as unusual among these new languages, and give it a unique set of strengths.

This talk explores the virtues of Elixir processes and demonstrates how to work with them.

Finally we will take a deeper dive into a real world example; constructing a capable webserver.

Afterwards

The talks should be finished by 8pm. After that, you’ve got two main options if
you want to keep chatting to other LRUG attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Agenda

This Code Sucks — A Story About Nonviolent Programming

Think about something that happened at work recently. How did it make you feel? Why did it make you feel that way?

Chances are you answered those two questions poorly. Our inability to answer such questions effectively leads us to communicate in ways that are negative and unhelpful.

Let’s explore a day in the life of a fictional programmer who, just like us, means well and wants to do a great job. We’ll use our protagonist’s story to learn about how to honestly express our needs and effectively collaborate in disagreement.

Choosing Ruby for a New Startup

In 2016 I needed to pick the right set of tools for my web based startup, but Ruby on Rails was not my first choice. I will talk about some of the questions I asked myself as a C++/Perl/Java developer and some of the Ruby tools I picked.

3 ways of using React with Rails - pros and cons

A quick look at a few ways of using React with Ruby on Rails. The pros and cons of using React inside Rails with gems or in a separate frontend app with a Rails API.

Food and Drinks

The nice people at BookingBug have arranged to
provide us with some pizza and drinks. These will be available before the
meeting in the Skills Matter downstairs bar area. BookingBug is one of the UK's
(and Europe's) fastest-growing tech companies, and they're proud of their great
working culture and the learning & growth opportunities they offer. They're
hiring and keen to speak with Ruby on Rails developers looking for their next
challenge.

Afterwards

The talks should be finished by 8pm. After that, you’ve got two main options if
you want to keep chatting to other LRUG attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

A Brief (and incomplete) introduction to Rust (for Rubyists)

Rust! It's the latest flavour of the month. Find out about this friendly
low-level language, why rockstar Rubyists like Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik
like it, and how to embed it in your Ruby code to get a bigger speed boost
than those shiny stars in Mariokart.

Do you even declarative?

A reflection on some recent tweets about declarative programming by Sarah Mei,
and a look at the broader idea of the relationship between mathematics and
computing.

Afterwards

The more-structured part of the meeting ends at 8pm, but that doesn't mean your
Ruby-related fun needs to end. Amidst the near-infinite sea of possibilities
that London offers you, we can recommend winding down the evening and chatting
to other LRUG attendees in either of these locations:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosting on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Mobile Journey at FreeAgent

Taking a journey from 2012 to the present, you will find out how FreeAgent
ended up with a hybrid App Store solution and the process involved in
building & shipping it: our initial Rails-based explorations, the making
of a hybrid app, how we structure the codebase, using the Asset Pipeline
to compile & deploy a non-Rails app, moving from CoffeeScript to ES6, and
whether the Asset Pipeline is a good fit for such an app.

Live Coding

Practical hypermedia APIs in Ruby

Ismael will share their experience building hypermedia APIs in Ruby.
What matters, what doesn’t, and what implications the approach might have
on the way you design server code, client implementations and documentation.

Afterwards

The more-structured part of the meeting ends at 8pm, but that doesn't mean your
Ruby-related fun needs to end. Amidst the near-infinite sea of possibilities
that London offers you, we can recommend winding down the evening and chatting
to other LRUG attendees in either of these locations:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosing on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.

Dependency Injection with Little Boxes

A brief description of the benefits of dependency injection and how to gain
them with Little Boxes.

Afterwards

We aim to finish up the talks and formal part of the meeting by 8pm, but that
doesn't mean you have to go home. Why not celebrate our headlong rush towards
the vernal equinox by selecting one of two very fine options for winding down
the evening and chatting to other LRUG attendees:

Code Node. Skills Matter run a cash bar with a
choice of drinks (hard and soft) available. As well as other LRUG members
you can network with attendees of the other meetups that Skills Matter are
hosing on the same night.

The Singer Tavern. This bar is a short walk
north from Code Node (you can find it at 1 City Road, EC1Y
1AG). This pub has a decent food menu on offer
as well as a selection of drinks and other LRUG attendees to help you
while the evening away.

Regardless of what you choose to do, please remember that this part of the
meeting is still covered by our code of
conduct even though it does seem more
informal.

If for some reason you can't make the talks you're still more than welcome to
attend this afterwards part. We'd love to see you!

Venue & Registration

Prior to attending you should familiarise yourself with our
README paying close attention to the code of
conduct which applies to
all attendees at the talks and afterwards in the pub.

Venue

Registration

To secure a place at the meeting you mustregister with our hosts
Skills Matter. It helps to
make sure we have the room laid out with enough chairs, and in extreme cases
that we get priority on the larger rooms over other groups using the space on
the same night. Also, it's good manners, so please do register with Skills
Matter.